Early holiday retail sales forecasts for 2004 might have led you to believe that stores would be busy as usual this year. Now that it

Even for those companies, still a majority, not immediately involved in the rush to implement RFID, that rush may be the harbinger of innovative ways to do business. For example, radio-frequency-based product ID and shrink management systems provider Checkpoint Systems has announced the organization of a network of companies interested in providing end users with compliance support for the Electronic Product Code, which represents the new RFID wave of product code numbers. T

The Material Handling Industry Association has been active in promoting both organizational and more public, commercial projects in the last few months.

All shopping channels may flow into the same great retail sea, but customer service can mean something much different for traditional shoppers and online shoppers. A new survey conducted jointly by the NRF Foundation and American Express indicates that for online consumers, customer service concerns focus on Web site security, with 88% ranking that extremely important, and on-time delivery being a major concern of 73%.

Ernst & Young LLP has released its annual holiday sales forecast, which largely bears out the most recent figures from the National Retail Federation: Retailers can expect a 6% increase in sales over Nov./Dec. last year. The continuing rise of energy prices and stalled job creation and personal income are factors working against sales increases.

The National Retail Federation

Supply chain disruption can exact a heavy toll, averaging six- to seven-figure recovery costs for a single company, according to

According to a study of 276 North American companies by operational performance consulting firm Celerant and the Economist Intelligence Unit, over 40% of the senior executives responding claim that implementation of performance initiatives have shown disappointing results.

For businesses contemplating operations in Europe, Seattle-based contact center solutions provider Envision Telephony offers new possibilities through the expansion of its Performance Suite to integrate with the logging systems of such European competitors as NICE, Verint, and Witness/Eyretel. On the other side of the globe, vendors in the manufacturing and logistics sectors that are interested in going to market in Asia can call on ARC Advisory Group

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